Robert Wringham

Robert Wringham

We are all trapped by modern life. Trapped! Trapped by work, consumerism, stress, debt, isolationism and general unhappiness.

We will each spend an average of 87,000 hours at work before we die. We will spend another 5,000 hours getting to and from work and countless more preparing for work. Worrying about work. Recovering from work.

The majority of us hate our jobs. But without work, we can't buy all the things we've been told we should want and need, so around we go...

Through the pages of New Escapologist magazine, Robert Wringham has been studiously examining the traps of modern life, questioning where our commitment to them stems from and why we are so unable to break free.

Taking inspiration from the great Escapologist Harry Houdini – who escaped from jail cells, straitjackets, and even the innards of a dead whale – Wringham applies Houdini's feats as a metaphor for real life, proposing the principle of Escapology as a way to cut loose our shackles.

Become a modern-day Escapologist and freedom and happiness might be possible after all.

Robert Wringham is a writer, performer and editor of New Escapologist, a small-press magazine for working stiffs who sometimes need a little escape. Now in its tenth issue, the magazine has seen contributions from Alain de Botton, Richard Herring, Ewan Morrison, Tom Hodginkson, Leo Babauta, Luke Rhinehart and many others. His first book, You Are Nothing (2012), is a history of Cluub Zarathustra, the comedy club that hit the London underground scene in the 90s. His humorous essays were compiled into his second book, A Loose Egg (2014), and have appeared in Idler, Playboy, HiLoBrow, the British Comedy Guide, Splitsider, and hundreds of others. He writes as a humourist and as an Escapologist, exploring both the minutiae and the larger mechanisms of modern life.

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